Roman Noze, co-founder and CTO Simplay

Introduction

Israeli cloud gaming startup Simplay has developed a unique real-time streaming
technology to provide a flawless, low latency cloud-based gaming experience to end-
users. For an optimal engineering design of the underlying hardware environment,
Simplay selected IaaS hosting provider NovoServe to establish a lab environment in one
of NovoServe’s company-owned data centers in the Netherlands. NovoServe’s engineers
then helped Simplay find the best performing hardware solution for their proprietary
cloud gaming technology and R&D demand.

Simplay started its operations in Tel Aviv, Israel in stealth mode early 2017. The
founders of this cloud gaming technology startup, CEO Gil Tov-ly and CTO Roman Noze,
passionate gamers themselves, at first took their time for Research & Development and
optimizing their software to achieve real-time, low latency streaming for video games.
At the same time Simplay gained access to an accelerator program. They then managed
to create their market-ready cloud gaming technology, called Shift, able to operate at the
GPU level for both capture (server side) and render (client side) - for zero visible latency
results.

About

I don’t think there are many hosting companies that are able and willing to provide
custom engineering services and personal communication such as delivered by
NovoServe - especially not for a startup cloud gaming company like Simplay at the early
stage of its go-to-market journey.

Roman Noze

Co-founder and CTO Simplay

Solution

Cloud Gaming R&D Requirements

As a cloud gaming startup, Simplay initially deployed their lab environment with one of
the world’s largest IaaS hosting providers, but Simplay’s R&D team required more
flexibility and cooperative engineering support from their hosting infrastructure
supplier. They expected their hosting partner to think along with them and strengthen
their own R&D efforts. The underlying hardware infrastructure also had to be delivered
against more cost-effective price levels to make Simplay’s cloud gaming offering
interesting enough to stand out from the competition.

“It was in the 4 th quarter of 2017 that we decided to be ready for the next-stage
development of our beta cloud gaming product,” said Roman Noze, co-founder and
CTO of Simplay. “We finally wished to open it to the world, to real users, but our
experience with this large IaaS hosting provider was pretty much frustrating. Basically
no one at this company talked to us, while communication with our hosting partner is of
fundamental importance for a gaming technology startup like us. Also, support tickets
were usually not solved according to our satisfaction. So we were seeking a hosting
provider that would be much more customer oriented and really willing to communicate
with us.”

Experimental Engineering Efforts

NovoServe’s company-owned data centers in the Netherlands and its cross-border
Netherlands/Germany network backbone with low latency European reach matched
Simplay’s ambitions to not only setup a new lab environment but also operationally
bring their cloud gaming product to end-users across Europe.

“The hosting infrastructure had to be a bit cheaper than with our previous provider to
support a more cost-efficient business model for Simplay,” added Mr. Noze. “The
solutions delivered by NovoServe were not a little bit cheaper though, they were way
cheaper. It was totally crazy. And they were willing to go the extra mile for us in terms of
meeting our custom engineering requirements. We wanted to experiment with the
hardware infrastructure to find the optimal configuration for our cloud gaming
technology. The previous provider had some fixed inventory of servers and hardware
that they could provide, but NovoServe was willing to reach out to their suppliers and
order really specialized hardware with specific requirements for us. With NovoServe we
were able to have an upgrade from an older CPU model to the latest architecture of
NVIDIA for example, the Tesla P40.”

Low Latency Reach Across Europe

The hardware environment NovoServe has provided to Simplay initially served their
cloud gaming test lab – to find an optimal engineered configuration for the company’s
proprietary cloud gaming technology. Later on the same hosting configuration became
their cloud gaming operational infrastructure. A game and device agnostic platform,
Simplay’s offering provides remote devices with real-time game streaming for
whichever game that’s being played on the cloud platform.

Simplay was focused on reaching cloud gaming players in the Netherlands, Germany, UK
and France from NovoServe’s data center in Doetinchem, the Netherlands. “Most of the
well-known games have been tested on our NovoServe-powered cloud gaming platform
and the experience is very, very good,” added Mr. Noze. “Also, NovoServe’s support is
great. There is always someone to talk to and the not so many issues were solved
quickly.”

Cost-Effective, Powerful Hosting

The Simplay CTO especially appreciates NovoServe’s willingness to operate as a
valuable extension of their own R&D engineering capabilities. “We had multiple Skype
and emailing sessions to come up with the best hosting infrastructure design that suited
our specific cloud gaming use case,” added Mr. Noze. “We suffered some issues on the
storage side for example, storage was a bottleneck. NovoServe helped us out with that.
Their engineers were deploying different testing environments until we found the right
storage setup that was a perfect fit for our cloud gaming needs.”

“This is a big advantage with NovoServe, they basically just custom-built our whole
hosting environment,” added Mr. Noze. “Any request, any question…you name it. We
had some ideas on how we could change our cloud gaming infrastructure, to make it
cheaper and more powerful at the same time. We had various strange requests with
NovoServe, like: let’s try AMD consumer cards. NovoServe went to its suppliers and
bought an AMD consumer card, just for our lab tests. I don’t think there are many
hosting companies that are able and willing to provide custom services and personal
communication such as delivered by NovoServe - especially not for a startup company
such as Simplay at the early stage of its go-to-market journey.”

Business Model, Gaming Studios

After launching the game-agnostic Simplay cloud gaming solution, Simplay successfully
provided thousands of gamers across Europe with a low latency gaming experience. It
was mid 2018 when Simplay decided to switch to a B2B model and start offering a
browser-based client instead of a Windows client.

“At some point it became clear that our cloud gaming business model was super difficult
to scale,” added Mr. Noze. “We would have needed to invest tremendous amounts of
resources that we don’t have to make an end-user focused business model profitable.
That’s why at a certain point we decided to transform our business model and aim our
technology and services at gaming studios with up to 100 or 250 developers.”

IaaS Hosting Solutions Delivered

NovoServe’s engineers have deployed a very cost-effective, client-specific dedicated
server and network setup that meets the demanding requirements of Simplay’s cloud
gaming operations.
To help Simplay with its R&D efforts and allow the company to experiment with the
hardware and configuration, NovoServe established a cloud gaming test lab in its
company-owned data center in Doetinchem, the Netherlands. After conducting a wide
variety of tests with different hosting infrastructure setups including a cloud gaming
aligned storage solution, Simplay managed to find an optimal engineered configuration
for its their proprietary cloud gaming technology called Shift.
Later on, the hosting configuration was combined with NovoServe’s European network
backbone. This became Simplay’s operational infrastructure offering gamers across
Europe a low latency cloud gaming experience.